November Linkfest

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, announced yesterday, is refudiate. Runners-up included vuvuzela, bankster, and nom nom. Read all about it. For the curious: my archived posts about NOAD’s words of the year for 2007, 2008, and 2009.

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If you, like me, see red when you find misspellings, errors of fact, and grammatical mistakes in published books, help is at hand. Typoze allows you to report typos online, thereby contributing to “improving the overall quality of published material.” I’ve done it; it’s easy and satisfying. My only question: Where do I report the typos in Typoze’s own web and blog content?

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After 94 years, beloved spokeslegume Mr. Peanut finally, um, speaks. And he sounds a lot like Robert Downey, Jr. (Ad Broad.)

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Rob Beschizza was struck by how the New York Times’s stories about the Iraq War Wikileaks material “could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — without using the word ‘torture.’” So he created a torture euphemism generator. Why should Times reporters have all the fun? (Via Mark Peters.)

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If you’d lived in Chaucer’s time, you’d have known what sort of work a cautioner, a pannarius, and a tapley did. Find definitions for those and other trade names on this fascinating list. Despite the list’s title, the names are not “Old English”; they’re old, and they’re from the British Isles, but their etymologies are variously French, Latin, German, and Middle English. (Via Kevin Smokler, aka Weegee.)

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The New York Times blog Schott’s Vocab has been performing an invaluable service by reprinting archived entries from American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society. Here, from 1934, is one of my favorities: a glossary of shoe-salesman lingo. A brief excerpt: “The widths of the shoe, A, B, C, D, and E, are called Al, Benny, Charley, Dave, and Eddie. These names are used to conceal the size from the customer.”

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The Gobbledygook Grader reveals how much of your writing (or a colleague’s) is ridden with “gobbledygook, jargon, clichés and over-used, hype-filled words.” Just copy and paste a passage into the window to receive your grade—and tips for improving it.

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“Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull . . .” Surely you know the rest of the “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” tale, right? Hint: read it aloud, slowly. (Or listen to the recording.) From San Francisco’s wonderful, one-of-a-kind Exploratorium. (Hat tip: Mighty Red Pen and Trochee.)

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How do you pronounce Cthulhu? Linux? Mister Mxyzptlk? To the rescue, from Geekosystem, comes the ultimate geek pronunciation guide. Mister Mxyzptlk, by the way, is not to be confused with the hip New York store Mxyplyzyk, named for the same Superman character but spelled differently and pronounced “mix-ee-pliz-ik.” (Hat tip: Karen.)

Comments

[Jessica]

Re Ladle Red Rotten Hut, have you ever read Mots d'Heure Gousse Rames? (http://www.amazon.com/Mots-dHeures-Luis-dAntin-Rooten/dp/0140057307) If not, you should!

[Nancy Friedman]

Jessica: Indeed, I own a copy of Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames, which the back cover says (accurately) "will delight readers with its Frenchified, phonetic high jinks." An example: "Tam-tam, de paille personne/Est-ce tôle, épigone, et ouais! y runes."